Lena Davis has been a music producer, writer and Personal Manager; a photographer and journalist and, over thirty years ago, got together with Caroline Scattergood to create the Caring & Sharing Trust to bring music, hope and love into the lives of people with learning disabilities and their families from throughout Northamptonshire.
David Bowie Made Me Gay by Darryl W Bullock (Published by Duckworth Overlook £18.99) has the subtitle “100 Years of LGBT Music”. And that is the true description of this interesting volume. Darryl is also the author of “Florence Foster Jenkins” which was fairly recently made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant.
His latest book is very is very different in respect that it is a highly researched piece of scholarship which might well be the study book for degrees in LGBT studies of the future. As Darryl has to rely a tremendous amount on the printed word (there are pages and pages of end notes listing the various newspapers and magazines which are quoted as fact) this creates a problem of its own. Having been both a Journalist and Publicist in the music business for many years I have to confess that not everything that ends up in print is true – to say the least!
To get the truth you really need to have been there and we can’t expect Darryl to have “been there” for the 100 years the volume covers. However, I was there from the Sixties onwards and, we simply made it up as we went along. What we had in common in the Sixties was that most of us were very young and we didn’t set out to break the rules – we simply didn’t know what they were!
Everyone mixed together be you gay, straight, black, white, or, like some, a mixture of the lot. Nowadays being gay, like being anything else you might fancy, is less of a problem than ever. The problem today is probably lack of freedom of speech and expression. As John Cleese says, there would have been no Monty Python today when comedy is not allowed to make fun of each and every one of us oddballs called the human race.
Everyone who loves American crime novels already lauds the name of Michael Connelly. His latest is “The Late Show” (Orion Books £19.99). Michael is a former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times and really knows what he is talking about regarding procedure. His Harry Bosch thrillers are currently being dramatized in the “Bosch” series on Amazon Prime which is now in its third season.
In “The Late Show” we meet his newest detective, a young woman called Renee Ballard who is a fascinating creation. I loved this book and am already a fan of Detective Ballard.
